Russia was a singularly poor laboratory for Long-Term’s type of trading. Less than a decade removed from communism and struggling to become a democratic society, Russia was almost inherently unpredictable. Haghani’s knowledge of history should have told him that. (Churchill had declared in 1939, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”) In 1998, too, Russia was beyond the realm of econometrics, even of the computers in Greenwich.
